When I was 14 mum would take me to five-star hotels and blag her way into free stays. At 15, we wandered through central Europe. 17 marked the end of my formal education, all 6 years of it, when I dropped out of high school in Italy, partly due to the endless fighting and financial instability at home, but mostly because my mum thought school was pointless, a life of adventure (contra provincial peace) was all that was worth living. At 18, she walked into a Congolese rebel camp in Goma, and asked if she could hitch a ride on any flights going to Kinshasa. At 20, I attempted to escape my mum’s orbit by moving away into a share house in Johannesburg and keeping the address from her. I bought a motorcycle to get to work, and my mum, not to be outdone, got herself into a Manila police riding course somehow. My biggest rebellion against her diktats was to do the one thing she despised most: get a job and work towards an attempt at stable life.

She wasn’t kind, she had zero maternal instincts, and there was no room for her child’s personality in her world. Her problems were my problems since as young as I could remember: attempting to mediate her combative marriage, or provide her with a sense of stability she never cared to work towards herself. Self-sabotage could have been her middle name, and I was nothing if not her crowning achievement, a tall, thoughtful kid who was proof that that she wasn’t a fuck up. Up until my 20s, when others were forming a stable sense of self, I was mostly trying to push away my mother’s lack of boundaries, and address her demands to fix her endless self-initiated issues. In her mind, she deserved some mythical alpha male with infinite financial resources and infinite patience, who would always be there to provide a nurturing family environment when she needed respite between her adventures, whilst her son – regardless of age – existed mostly to serve her and reinforce her delusions.

But it wasn’t all bad. Narcissists can be wonderful people: fierce and brave individualists who seem to care so little about what people think of them. When I did accompany my mother on her globetrotting adventures, we felt impervious to the world. The only thing that mattered was making her happy, and she had the courage and the sheer audacity to take care of (mostly) everything else, if only by making outrageous demands to strangers. She held herself in such high esteem (most things done to survive like a common mortal were beneath her dignity), that I did learn to be successful in work simply by demanding more. I can certainly say that my life growing up was never boring, mostly because she didn’t believe either in stability or in hard work.

Where I am I now, approaching 40, in regards to that mother-shaped hole (and a fair bit of C-PTSD) in my psyche? I haven’t spoken to her in five years, not since she attempted to barge back into my life twice, once after getting an Australian divorcee in Jerusalem to buy her flights with him back to Australia, and then insisted I stay over at his house in Cronulla over a very weird and painfully awkward series of days in some kind of parody of how domestic life was supposed to be. And the final time after I felt a bit rootless and homesick and tried to move back to Germany, to make sense of my maternal origins and passport country on my own terms, but had once again to contend with her demanding, unilaterally, that I make space for her, even to the extent of her seeing my long-time partner as some kind of rival.

My foundational challenges, beyond the “garden variety” complex trauma triggers, emotional dysregulation and attachment issues, has been one of representation and identity. Where would someone with this kind of background start to make sense of it? Where would I find experiences I could empathise with represented in popular culture, novels or cinema? Issues of identity often seem remarkably simple even in the wokest of TV: once the character uncovers their foundational identity, in the face of prejudice and strong odds, then they migrate to their people and we have have a sunset money-shot moment. Where would I find my culture, my people, my place, if most of my childhood life had been about mum erasing her provincial German background, never permitting me to settle anywhere, and making everything about her?

This need to address this very real and often unbearably painful sense of lack, of being an incomplete human, is a big part of what has driven my hunger for philosophy, music and cinema. This personal need to historicise and contextualise my experiences to start to make sense of them. We have this key historical moment in the 19th century and the explosion in popularity of the novel, and the equivalent explosion in the 20th century of cinema. In both instances people were turning to narrative to make sense of a world changing rapidly and confusingly, and learning about “what is normal”. Representation matters, and it matters a thousand times more to people in under-represented demographics. Because going through life feeling abnormal, or lacking the language to describe how to feel and make sense of one’s lived reality is something very painful to bear. Making sense of one’s identity isn’t a theoretical exercise here, it’s foundational to being in the world.

I am slowly able to now begin, very tentatively, to make sense of the mother-shaped hole, of those jarred and disjointed vignettes strewn across the world that make up my life. To accept myself, holes and all, as being as worthy of life as everyone else. To accept that that hole, that sense of an incomplete identity is ok, as being a shifting work-in-progress is foundational to being human. And importantly, to understand that vulnerability isn’t just acceptable, it is key to forming and maintaining close relationships.

The void, those series of gaps and ruptures, in my education, connections and identity, no longer terrifies me as it did most of my life. Once I either ran from it, buried it in shame, or ran towards that next thing that just might stem the deluge of incomprehensible incompleteness. Now it simply exists, like the Oribi gorge, in all its wondrous complexity and depths. That journey is a story for another day.